The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis

Since 2014, international monetary agencies have been issuing warnings to a small group of finance ministers, banks, and private equity funds: The US government's cowardly choices not to prosecute J.P. Morgan and its ilk and to bloat the economy with a $4 trillion injection of easy credit are driving us headlong toward a cliff. As Rickards shows in this frightening, meticulously researched book, governments around the world have no compunction about conspiring against their citizens.

Amazon Customer says:"worth reading for those interested in economics"

The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class

A hundred years ago, many theorists believed - just as they did at the beginning of our 21st century - that the world had reached a state of economic perfection, a never-before-seen human interdependence that would lead to universal growth and prosperity. Then, as now, the German mark was one of the most trusted currencies in the world. Yet the early years of the Weimar Republic in Germany witnessed the most calamitous meltdown of a developed economy in modern times.

The New Case for Gold

James Rickards is the most visible, vocal, and intelligent proponent for the gold standard today, and his unwavering stance on gold's value has drawn him hordes of lifelong fans. In The New Case for Gold, Rickards explains why gold is one of the safest assets for investors in times of political instability and market volatility and how every investor should look to add gold to his or her portfolio.

Current global trends are bleak: weak economic growth, too much debt, declining incomes for the lower 99 percent, a dangerous addiction to fossil fuels, and ecological destruction - just to name a few. Many of us understandably feel resigned to an eroding standard of living in the years to come. At best. But what if we told you that there are specific attainable steps you can take today that can limit your vulnerability to these trends and help you be richer, healthier, and happier?

The Silver Manifesto

There are factors that produce immense profits and these occur rarely. Investors stand at a unique point in monetary history where the death of paper currencies on a global scale is taking place before their eyes. Because most are frozen into inside-the-box thinking, few investors will ride the next move as silver (and gold) skyrocket in the years ahead. In fact the primary purpose of this book is to educate the listener as to why there is no way out of the financial morass created by the financial elite.

Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crises

In 1971, President Nixon imposed national price controls and took the United States off the gold standard, an extreme measure intended to end an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar. Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and this time the consequences will be far worse than those that confronted Nixon. Currency wars are one of the most destructive and feared outcomes in international economics.

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

This classic expose of the Fed has become one of the best-selling books in its category of all time. Where does money come from? Where does it go? Who makes it? The money magician's secrets are unveiled. Here is a close look at their mirrors and smoke machines, the pulleys, cogs, and wheels that create the grand illusion called money. A boring subject? Just wait. You'll be hooked in five minutes. It reads like a detective story - which it really is, but it's all true.

The Coming of the Third Reich

There is no story in 20th-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time.

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse

Dr. Mohamed A. El-Erian, one of the world's most influential economic thinkers and the author of When Markets Collide, has written a road map to what lies ahead and the decisions we must make now to stave off the next global economic and financial crisis. Our current economic path is coming to an end. The signposts are all around us: sluggish growth, rising inequality, stubbornly high pockets of unemployment, and jittery financial markets, to name a few. Soon we will reach a fork in the road.

The Mystery of Banking

Talk about great timing. Rothbard's extraordinary book unravels the mystery of banking: What is legitimate enterprise and what is a government-backed shell game that can't last? His explanation is clear enough for anyone to follow and yet precise and rigorous enough to be the best textbook for college classes on the topic. This is because its expository clarity - in its history and theory - is essentially unrivaled. Most notably, he uses the T-account method of explaining the relationship between deposits and loans, showing the inherent instability of fractional reserve banking.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism

In this book, Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy, explains the transition to what he describes as "crowd-based capitalism" - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. As peer-to-peer commercial exchange blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, how will the economy, government regulation, what it means to have a job, and our social fabric be affected?

Breaking Rockefeller: The Incredible Story of the Ambitious Rivals Who Toppled an Oil Empire

Marcus Samuel, Jr., is an unorthodox Jewish merchant trader. Henri Deterding is a take-no-prisoners oilman. In 1889 John D. Rockefeller is at the peak of his power. Having annihilated all competition and possessing near-total domination of the market, even the US government is wary of challenging the great "anaconda" of Standard Oil. The Standard never loses - that is, until Samuel and Deterding team up to form Royal Dutch Shell.

America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve

Until the election of Woodrow Wilson the United States - alone among developed nations - lacked a central bank. Ever since the Revolutionary War, Americans had desperately feared the consequences of centralizing the nation's finances under government control. However, in the aftermath of a disastrous financial panic, Congress was persuaded - by a confluence of populist unrest, widespread mistrust of bankers, ideological divisions, and secretive lobbying - to approve the landmark 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe

In The Euro, Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling author Joseph E. Stiglitz dismantles the prevailing consensus around what ails Europe, demolishing the champions of austerity while offering a series of plans that can rescue the continent - and the world - from further devastation. Hailed by its architects as a lever that would bring Europe together and promote prosperity, the euro has done the opposite. As Stiglitz persuasively argues, the crises revealed the shortcomings of the euro.

Economic Collapse: Prepping for Tomorrow Series

Economic Collapse is a primer on the reality that our nation will ultimately perish at the hands of economic and societal collapse. The United States economy can collapse as a result of our own government's mismanagement of our national debt or external factors such as a global financial meltdown, an attack on the US dollar, and other predictable scenarios.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy

Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his 10 years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy, he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance.

The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy - How to Save Yourself and Your Country

In The Real Crash, New York Times best-selling author Peter D. Schiff argues that America is enjoying a government-inflated bubble, one that reality will explode... with disastrous consequences for the economy and for each of us. Schiff demonstrates how the infusion of billions of dollars of stimulus money has only dug a deeper hole: The United States government simply spends too much and does not collect enough money to pay its debts, and in the end, Americans from all walks of life will face a crushing consequence.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men". John Perkins wrote that economic hit men (EHM) "are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder".

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World

Shaped by his 25 years traveling the world and enlivened by encounters with tycoons, presidents, and villagers from Rio to Beijing, Ruchir Sharma's The Rise and Fall of Nations rethinks the "dismal science" of economics as a practical art. Narrowing the thousands of factors that can shape a country's fortunes to 10 clear rules, Sharma explains how to spot political, economic, and social changes in real time. He shows how to read political headlines, black markets, the price of onions, and billionaire rankings as signals of booms, busts, and protests.

The Coming Bond Market Collapse: How to Survive the Demise of the U.S. Debt Market

A book that is certain to spark controversy within the financial media and throughout the halls of government, The Coming Bond Market Collapse sounds a clarion call to investors, business leaders, and policymakers. Author Michael Pento, a noted adherent of the Austrian school of economics theories, compellingly argues that the United States is fast approaching the end stage of the biggest asset bubble in history.

Donald P. Williams says:"Nothing new, just a regurgitation of many others"

The Forgotten Man

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation.

The Money Bubble

Turk and Rubino are back to say that history is about to repeat. Instead of addressing the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, the world's governments have continued along the same path, accumulating even more debt and inflating even bigger financial bubbles. So another - even bigger - crisis is coming.

Publisher's Summary

When Money Dies is the classic history of what happens when a nation's currency depreciates beyond recovery. In 1923, with its currency effectively worthless (the exchange rate in December of that year was one dollar to 4,200,000,000,000 marks), the German republic was all but reduced to a barter economy.

Expensive cigars, artworks, and jewels were routinely exchanged for staples such as bread; a cinema ticket could be bought for a lump of coal; and a bottle of paraffin for a silk shirt. People watched helplessly as their life savings disappeared and their loved ones starved. Germany's finances descended into chaos, with severe social unrest in its wake.

Money may no longer be physically printed and distributed in the voluminous quantities of 1923. However, quantitative easing, that modern euphemism for surreptitious deficit financing in an electronic era, can no less become an assault on monetary discipline. Whatever the reason for a country's deficit - necessity or profligacy, unwillingness to tax, or blindness to expenditure - it is beguiling to suppose that if the day of reckoning is postponed economic recovery will come in time to prevent higher unemployment or deeper recession. What if it does not? Germany in 1923 provides a vivid, compelling, sobering moral tale.

This book enlightened me on many shades of the hyperinflation in Germany, both before WWI, after, and leading up to WWII. The narrator, though not so spirited, does a decent job. I think if you're not already interested in the subject, this would bore you though. It's packed with information.

This book did have its interesting tidbits and the narrator is fine, so I didn't feel I wasted a credit or anything. But due to this being such a fascinating subject, I was rather disappointed. the writer wrote it like a boring history text and left me with more question then he answered. I hope I can find other books on this subject.

The subject matter is fascinating and very little covered by history books. It is obviously very touchy for an English author since it might point to the unfairness of the Versailles treaty. So this author is endlessly beating around the bush by telling you the price of eggs, train tickets and other data that makes your head spin but he's not developing enough the big picture.

So yes, there was inflation in the 1920s but how did they get there? Why did the Kaiser abdicate? Who took power? What was the mechanisms of tax collection and why did they collapse? The treaty of Versailles and the subsequent adjustments to the war reparation are mentioned in very few sentences, but very under developed...

So if you want to know how much was an egg in Berlin during 1920, 1921, 1922... etc go ahead and get this book. The author is incredibly proud of this data and he assumes you know all the other details of the Weimar Germany. Well, I didn't so I expected a lot more...

Got a little tired of the story after a while printing printing printing. But the author really gives you the sense of what it was like to be a German at that time. Totally bewildered in a country that didn't seem to have a sense of what was going wrong. Its hard to fathom, but clearly the German people were "softened up" by this spectacular event. Is the author correct in his assertions toward the end that reparations were not responsible? Dunno that I trust the author given there wasn't much theory in this book. However, the author sticks to his guns and that is clearly very interesting. Also interesting in that most history books blame reparations but few clearly spell out that reparations were due in gold notes. Most modern day economists would say printing is not a way to get out of gold payments. And that might be true, but the author seems pretty convincing that the Germans weren't attempting that folly.

Had the author introduced a much higher degree of economic analysis, I feel that the emotional impact would have been far less. Its kind of like reading Dickens and then complaining you didn't get any Malthus in the text. This book if you really stay with it can really bring home the emotional impact of what it was like to be a German pre-Hitler. Had the author delved into how Hitler comes to power and/or the economic theories behind the printing of money and the gold based reparations payments, the emotional impact would have been lost.

I give it five stars... to stay disciplined with such a subject... to write what had to be written knowing full well you would only be a part piece of the puzzle... thats a thing we don't get from authors very much these days. Thanks to the authors. If the author is correct about the last part (I just don't know that much about the history of those times)... wow... just wow... very illuminating. He doesn't really provide alot of justification for the claims at the end just sort of lays them out there. To understand all of that and not change the scope is a gift to the reader. So my long winded advice is to appreciate the narrow scope, appreciate the seemingly endless monetary printing, and let wash over you what it means to sing "Deutschland Uber-alles" pre-Hitler. Getting transported back in time is priceless.

Very informative, but could have been more informative. Yet for an 8 hour read or short book it tells a lot about post WW I central Europe. It must have been an extremely difficult time for Germans, Austrians and Hungarians. If this situation occurrs again in Europe or the US, which as we know history repeats then the duration and outcome will be much more dramatic. The daily massive inflation, hunger and unemployment these people endured, I feel a similar situation in the US would incurr civil unrest the world has never seen. Revolutionary like.....Russia? or Fascism?

For anyone who wants the rest of the story about the interwar years between WWI and WWII. Compelling tale of how the world got here from there in the context of post-WWI Europe. A must-read for economists, historians, public officials, and military strategists. Nests well as a post-script to Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August.'

Lets face it - we all rely on money these days, and what might happen if it becomes worthless is a nightmare few would be prepared to contemplate. This book gives what I think is a very good narrative of the years after WWI when Germany, Austria and Hungary suffered that very fate - to one degree or another - and why things were allowed to go so wrong. Of course it is easy to reel off loads of enormous numbers to show just how unreal economics had got, but there are also plenty of spotlights on how this all affected ordinary people, and I found people's optimism that things couldn't get any worse particularly striking, since things certainly did get worse. There are lessons to be learned, but of course every moment in history is unique and the economic mistakes of today are very different to those of 1919 etc, so simply expect a well presented story of the collapse of an economic system and its human consequences. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in economic or social history.

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Judy Corstjens

3/22/11

Overall

"Not as relevant as hoped"

I thought that a book about inflation would raise interesting pointers for today's economic situation, but I couldn't find the hoped for relevance. Hungary and Germany after the first world war were very specific cases. I think the book is showing its age too - we expect more commentary and polemic, perhaps, so spice up a modern read. Still, an informative historical read (I mean listen!)

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